Before we learned to count our coins,
we lived by what we could not earn:
the hands that held us through the night,
the care we later learned to return.
Now morning finds us making plans,
with bread to buy and work to do.
We carry names of those we love
through every door we hurry through.
And sometimes, in the crowded day,
a call reminds us why we live:
a prayer, a promise, someone’s need,
a quiet hour we ought to give.
We do not name that call alike.
Some turn to God; some sit in stillness.
Some hear it in a sacred word;
some in the work of tending illness.
Yet we can meet beside the scales
and keep our measure fair and true.
We need not share a name for faith
to honour what our hands can do.
We earn our bread. We tend our fields.
We plan against the coming rain.
But all our counting cannot hold
each turning of our joy and pain.
So let us do the work we can,
and rest when we have done our part.
Tomorrow need not find us free
of fear to find a steady heart.
If plenty comes, let room be made
for someone standing at the door.
If hardship comes, let no one say
our empty hands have made us less.
And when we find ourselves with power
over someone who caused us pain,
may we remember what it means
to fear that bread will come again.
We can be firm. We can be fair.
We can refuse another wrong.
And still leave room for someone else
to learn, repair, and carry on.
We will not always see a reward.
The honest road can still be steep.
Yet something in our lives stays whole
through promises we choose to keep.
Whatever we believe of heaven,
we share this earth, this passing day.
May what we take sustain our lives;
may what we give ease someone’s way.
And when the market lights go out,
and all our counting reaches its end,
may there be lives made gentler
by the way we chose to spend.
